Not all sudden transitions are caused by some “guilty” process slowly
driving the system over a tipping point – the kind of process
that early warning signals are designed to detect. Some systems may
experience such transitions purely by chance, leaving a stable state on
an extremely unlikely excursion that happens to stray to far from the
stable attractor [1]}, [2]}.
Like the evidence presented before the California Supreme
Court in 1968, the chance of observing such an “innocent” transition
a priori may be very small, but when selected from a historical record
of many possible transitions, this possibility can no longer be ignored.
